This investigation gives attention to the developmental course and influence of social class on self-directed, private speech. The Ss were 108 white, middle and lower class pre-school, first and third grade children. Two measures of receptive vocabulary were administered as background language measures. The experimental task required S to sort…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…